The Django Pony made her sparkly public debut. The infamous Beards of PyCon were
captured on film. Guido van Rossum announced the beginning of his gradual retirement
as Python's Benevolent Dictator for life - then kidnapped the Django Pony. Backseat
language drivers were threatened with the terribl(y silly) fate of being Van Lindberg'd.

PyCon 2009 drew nearly a thousand Python programmers from around the world, representing
projects on all seven continents - including Antarctica! They gathered for serious
learning, discussion, and strategizing... and for not-so-serious fun. PyCon 2010, the
eighth annual conference of the Python programming community, promises even more on all
counts: more talks, more education, more creativity; more work *and* more play.

Interest in PyCon is growing along with the use of the Python language itself.
This year alone has seen a 50% increase in the number of talk proposals submitted by
community members, and the organizers have added an unprecedented fifth track to the
conference schedule. The conference will include 95 regular talks and panels, covering
everything from language basics to deep-space astronomy to robotic submarines. PyCon
also offers 32 half-day tutorials, Open Space sessions, special keynotes, Lightning Talks,
development sprints, an exhibit hall, and a hands-on lab - countless opportunities for
attendees to learn. This year, PyCon also introduces poster sessions for detailed,
personal examination of a variety of topics with subject matter experts.

Python's growth has been partially driven by an explosion in new implementations of the
language. The IronPython and Jython implementations make Python a perfect tool for
.NET and Java environments, respectively, gaining full-scale use of those platforms'
existing capabilities and libraries while retaining Python's ease, elegance, and dynamism.
Other implementations, like Stackless and Google's Unladen-Swallow, focus on improving
Python execution speed. Finally, the Pynie and PyPy implementations bring Python programs
to all-new experimental execution environments. All these implementations will be examined
in several PyCon talks and in PyCon's Python Language Summit and Virtual Machine Summit.

PyCon 2010 will take place February 17 to 25 at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia. The
conference is organized and run by volunteer Python programmers; the users' perspective
governs everything from talk selection to conference cost, making an exceptionally
worthwhile conference. Registration is open now, and early-bird registration discounts
apply through January 6.

About Python
------------

Python is an open-source, dynamically typed, object-oriented programming language
that can be used in nearly the entire range of technology applications.
It offers an easy learning curve and access to a vast array of libraries. With
implementations available for all common operating systems as well as the Java
and .NET platforms, Python can be used on virtually any system in existence.
Python's power and versatility have made it one of the world's most popular
programming languages, currently ranked #7 in the TIOBE index. Like other
open-source, dynamic languages, it offers rapid productivity and a vigorous
developer community; at the same time, Python's clarity and reliability give
confidence to enterprise users.

About PyCon
-----------

Presented by the Python Software Foundation and sponsored by Google,
the world’s largest Python conference brings together a diverse group of
developers, enthusiasts, and organizations to explore new challenges, launch
new businesses and forge new connections within the Python community. PyCon
provides attendees with the opportunity to delve into the dynamic programming
language relied upon by institutions from MIT and NASA to Cisco and Walt
Disney. PyCon helps people learn new tools and techniques, present
their own projects, and meet other Python fans. Press passes to the conference
are available for members of the press who would like to witness PyCon in person.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.